The World Without a Future (The World Without End) (7 page)

“You did what you were told—I didn’t expect that.”

“I said I would,” I say defensively, flushing when he rolls his eyes. “I
do
take orders, when they make sense.”

“Like when Hellspawn was breached?”

That still bothers me. He shouldn’t have been in the Orchard—even if they had a protocol in place, a plan to get us out. “How did you get there so quickly?” I blurt out, and his eyes snap to mine.

They’re gray—a sharp, cold gray, like the sky over the wall at first light.

The thought is absurd, and I don’t know why I’m noticing, why now of all times. I flush and look out the window. “Your house wasn’t close to the Orchards.”

“Who said I was home?” he answers, looking back out the windshield.

Irritation sparks through me, and I look away as he laughs, sharp and mocking. “There are some benefits to the privacy of the orchards—benefits you don’t find in the Hive.”

A girl. He was in the Orchard with a
girl?

Heat floods my cheeks, and I twist away from him, furious and hating that I am.

“How long, to get to Haven 18?”

His lips do that irritating twitch again. “Two days, Nurrin. Get comfortable.”

That makes me nervous. Two
days,
trapped in this tiny car with Finn’s overly large presence? I look out the window as he slams the car forward. Infects are swarming toward us, and time seems to slow as the car speeds up. One catches my eyes as he races at us, his skin limp and hanging off his limbs in long, leathery strips. His left leg is twisted horribly, and I can see bone, but it doesn’t slow him as he throws himself against the Porsche. The car skids a little at the impact, and I see the terrible hunger and rage in the zombie’s eyes as Finn curses savagely, wrestling the car into submission and jerking forward. There’s a sick snap when we roll over something in the road, and I glance at him, worried, but his eyes are tight on the road—if it can even be called that—as we leave the zombies—and my brother—behind.

We travel in silence. I keep my gun in my lap, but, though we see small herds of zombies occasionally, they don’t give chase often, and when they do, the Porsche easily out paces them. Even a zombie will give up, after a while.

Eventually, I relax, stop scanning the desert for infects, and survey the interior of the car. The seat I’m sitting in is soft, buttery leather cocooning me. The interior is midnight black, and it makes Finn’s pale skin and startling eyes stand out in the dimness. He glances at me, as if feeling my gaze, and I flush, looking away.

And somehow, it changes the mood in the car. He doesn’t say a word, but there’s a tension now that wasn’t here minutes ago. I shift in my seat then curse myself for doing that. There’s a radio on his dash, though it’s useless. Radio died with the rest of the world, when I was born.

“I’m hungry,” I say, and Finn’s lips twitch again.

“There’s some energy bars in my bag,” is all he says, and I twist, my ass in the air as I shuffle through the bags we threw into the miniscule back when we jumped into the car. I let out a soft cry of triumph and slide down into my seat, sitting sideways, facing him with two energy bars.

“I’ve got peanut butter and chocolate, and tropical fruit,” I say, reading them. “You can pick, as long as you don’t want chocolate.”

I grin at him—and freeze. His expression, which has been neutral for most of the morning, is cold, icy and remote, and I shiver involuntarily. It draws his gaze, which flicks over me with a touch of heat that defies the coldness in him.

“Finn?” I ask, my voice cautious.

His gaze goes back to the road, and his voice is deliberately easy. “Chocolate. I don’t eat tropical fruit shit.”

I hesitate, and he holds out a hand, like he can snap his fingers and I’ll immediately cave.

That they
are
his energy bars doesn’t really matter much. I open the chocolate bar, and the smell slams into me. My stomach rumbles alarmingly, and Finn laughs, a sound that tickles my belly and sends butterflies to flight.

I break the bar and hand the smaller portion to him. Finn’s eyes narrow, and he gives me a disbelieving stare. I shrug. “I’m a girl.”

He opens his mouth to answer when it happens. The pop is loud—deafening in the silence of the desert—and the Porsche spins, skidding under the blown tire. My seat belt snaps me back as Finn curses, fighting for control of the car. Dust explodes around us as we skid off the road, into the soft dirt of the desert, and I close my eyes as we come to a stop.

“
Fuck!”
Finn snarls and explodes from the car. He’s moving fast, and I struggle to keep up.

“Do we have a spare?” I demand, and he grunts, already half under the Porsche. I couldn’t imagine him out in the Wide Open without something as basic as a spare tire.

A screech jerks my attention away from him as the tire slides out from under the car. I whip around and see them—four infects. Two large men, a girl who could have been my age when she turned, a little boy no older than eight. They move with an eerie beauty and grace, and aside from that initial scream, they are silent as they race toward us. I pull my snub-nosed revolver, line my sights and fire.

The little boy falls, and the girl freezes, staring at his prone body. Something twists in her expression when she looks back up, a snarl on her lips. Finn emerges from the car, breathless, and I snatch his crossbow as he throws it up at me. “Hurry,” I urge and bring the weapon up, firing twice in rapid succession. The male in the lead squeals when the first bolt lodges in his shoulder, and then the second embeds in his eye, spinning him around and killing his cry as he goes down like a sack of bricks. His pack mates hesitate, hissing, and I take a deep breath, aiming.

The scream the girl let out is so loud, and so unexpected, I jolt, firing inadvertently. It slams into her chest, and her scream gurgles off in a furious whine. Her eyes are full of hatred when she meets my gaze, a hungry, unthinking hatred that hits me like a hammer.

"Focus, Ren," Finn orders from near my hip, and it jerks me from my paralysis. Putting the other two down is easy after that, though the female lands disturbingly close to Finn's boot-clad feet. I step over, straddling his legs as I watch the puffs of dust on the desert. There are a lot—more than I think I can handle, and they're getting closer.

Drawn by the infect's angry scream.

"Hurry, O'Malley," I snap, and he grunts. Then the zombies are here—close enough I can put them down. I keep count for the first eight. After that, there are too many, too close, and as fast as I fire, there are more. The world seems to slow when I empty my clip. I drop the gun next to Finn's boots and pull my knives as the zombies swarm me. I shove the blade into the first's eye and grab him, pulling his limp corpse close to shield me as I attack the others. For a few minutes, straddling Finn, embracing a corpse and killing the infects, I think I can do this. Then one lunges at me from atop the Porsche and I scream as I duck away from her teeth. Her long fingers catch in my shoulder, and I feel the skin tear, feel the burn of the wound. Rage crystallizes into icy precision, and I hurl the zombie away from me and slam my blade into the infect that jumped me. "O'Malley, we gotta go!" I yell, reaching for and hurling my throwing stars. I’m running dangerously low on weapons, and I can’t fall back—they are already trying to slide past me, attack Finn where he is defenseless on the ground. Retreating would be a death sentence.

"Two minutes," he yells, and I kick the face of a infect who fell near him, scrabbling for a booted foot.

"
Now!
"
"

"Get in the car," he orders a heartbeat—a lifetime—later, and I laugh outright. No way in hell.

"Damn it, Ren, you promised!" he snarls, rolling to his knees and pulling his gun. The noise will draw more infects, but at this point, it might kill enough for us to get away, and that matters more than silence.

"When I said that, we weren't under attack."

He mutters something, and there's a brief lull in his firing before I hear the door swing open. An infect rushes me, and I swallow a shriek of pain as the exposed bones of his fingers break the skin, my blood spraying in a rush.

The remaining infects screech, and I slam my knife into the zombie's eye. A warm arm wraps around my waist, and I do scream as Finn pulls me into his lap and slams the door behind us.

I don't even have time to scramble out of his lap before he floors the gas and we explode from the horde in a burst of decaying bodies and dust.

My hands are shaking, adrenaline coursing through my body, and a random, awful thought hits me:
is this what it’s like for the infects?

A laugh burns in my throat, and I swallow hard, trying not to let it out, trying not to throw up. My arm and back are itchy, burning, and I jerk around so violently it jars Finn.

I’m still in his lap. How the fuck did I forget that I was in his lap? His arms are around me, holding the steering wheel. His face is close—close enough that I can see the tiny freckles I never knew he had, the muscles tightening in his jaw, the stubble, dark like his hair, on his jaw. His gray eyes flick up to mine, hot and hungry and furious. Startled, I almost fall off his lap and into my seat. He shifts a little. “You weren’t bitten.”

It’s a statement, and I’m not sure if he’s denying it as a possibility or stating something he’s observed. Either way, I shake my head. I wasn’t. “But I was scratched.”

He holds out his hand, and I give him my arm without saying anything in complaint. He examines the claw marks, the deep grooves that are still leaking blood, and I flush, trying to pull away—it’s revolting. Finn’s grip tightens, almost painfully, and he looks at me, furious.

“I told you to get in the car.”

“You could have died,” I answered, without thinking. “Those zombies were trying to get to your feet, your legs. You couldn’t have gotten clear of them.”

He doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and I twist, digging in the bags to find the first aid kit. I drop down into my seat with it and rip open a handful of alcohol wipes. They aren’t the best thing to use—acid would be, I think—but they’ll do for the moment. The wipes burn, and I hiss, my eyes watering. He’s still staring out the windshield, his jaw tight, and I sigh, wrapping a bandage around my arm. The bleeding has begun to slow, and I think it’ll be enough to tide me over until we get to Haven 18.

Maybe.

“You could say thank you,” I say, reaching around to swipe at my shoulder blade ineffectually.

Finn stares at me for a solid thirty seconds, and I realize what an idiot I must look like, before he finally shakes his head and looks away. “I told you, Nurrin. I won’t thank you for risking your life. Follow your damn orders before you get us both killed.”

He gentles the words, a little, by taking a clean wipe and rubbing my wounds. I gasp at the ruthless cleaning, but then he drops the wipe, and his fingers ghost over the cut before he pulls his hand back abruptly.

“You’ll have a scar. Two of them.”

I shrug and look away. “I’d have a lot more, if I walked the wall.”

A grin tugs at his lip, and I shiver under the gray gaze he sends my way. “You want to be a Wall Walker?”

“Why not?”

“Collin would never let you.” He laughs, like I’m an amusing joke. Or his best friend’s little sister, playing with the big boy’s toys. Heat flares through me, and something makes me shift in my seat, leaning over until my lips hovered a few inches from his ear. He is still—so still it seems obscene that we are moving.

“I didn’t need Collin to sponsor me. And I didn’t need you, O’Malley. I would have walked on my own.”

His gaze is dark, his lips so close to mine I can feel the air move when he demands, “Who the fuck was sponsoring you?”

I drop back into my seat and shrug, a little. “I would have found someone.”

He gives me a disbelieving stare, and I lean my seat back a few inches—as far as it’ll allow me to. “Wake me up when we get…there.” I wave a hand vaguely at the desert sprawling before us, and then I curl over on my side, tugging Collin’s shirt around me as I fall asleep.

The car slowing wakes me, and I jerk upright in the seat, my hand reaching automatically for my weapon. My heart stops when I remember, and I can't help the hiss of air.

"What?"

He doesn't bother to ask if I've slept well, and I sort of resent that. He's above mundane trivialities that seem to dominate the lives of everyone else.

I answer anyway, "My gun. I left it there, when we were attacked."

He doesn't even look away from the road. "You can get a new one at Haven 18. Or use one of mine—I have plenty."

I don't tell him that isn't the point—that this gun is special because Collin gave it to me, that it was the first thing he gave me after our mother turned. That it was hers. That it told me, more than words ever could, I was safe and loved and not alone in this fucked up world.

I shove those thoughts aside and look around. We're approaching a field of windmills, and I wonder if that's where we will rest for the night.